ABSTRACT
Since 1975, the G7 major industrial democracies, operating at both the leaders' and ministerial levels, have played a central role in shaping the international financial system and managing it to contain systemic crises and sustain global growth (Bayne 2000a, 2000b; Putnam and Bayne 1987; Funabashi 1987). As the age of intensified globalisation took hold during the second half of the 1990s, bringing with it a series of financial crises that culminated in the great Asian-turned-global crisis of 1997-99, the G7 played an ever more central and ultimately successful role in crisis response, global macroeconomic management, and financial system reconstruction (Hodges, Kirton, and Daniels 1999; Kaiser, Kirton, and Daniels 2000; Kirton, Daniels, and Freytag 2001a). It did so largely by working through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and through newer bodies such as the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) and the G20, and by operating as a concert within which a process of mutual adjustment and a sense of collective responsibility prevailed (Kirton 2001a, 2001b). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the G7 appeared to have put a new, effective edifice for global financial governance firmly in place (Kirton 2001b; Bayne 2001; Kirton and von Furstenberg 2001).
